For information about Hawaiiâs statewide Crossings 2003 events and programs at other venues, please also visit the official Crossings 2003 website: http://www.hawaii.edu/artgallery/crossings

Crossings 2003: Korea/HawaiÎi
September 19 - November 16, 2003

The Contemporary Museum (TCM), Honolulu, will participate in the Fall 2003 presentation of Crossings 2003: Korea/HawaiÎi, an international arts event commemorating the centennial of Korean immigration to the United States.

The Contemporary Museumâs Crossings 2003: Korea/HawaiÎi exhibition will be on view September 19 through November 16, 2003, at TCMâs Makiki Heights galleries. The exhibition will include sculpture, photography, video and mixed media works by some of South Korea's most prominent and thought-provoking artists.

Crossings 2003 is a collaborative event both between Korea and HawaiÎi and amongst various HawaiÎi arts organizations. Additional Crossings 2003 exhibitions will be on view at participating venues statewide, including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the University of HawaiÎi Art Gallery, Honolulu Hale, the East-West Center Gallery, Gallery ÎIolani at Windward Community College, Koa Gallery at Kapiolani Community College and Hui NoÎeau Visual Arts Center on Maui. Crossings 2003 will also feature a bilingual catalogue that documents the exhibitions of each participating institution.

Tom Klobe, Director of the University of HawaiÎi Art Gallery, is the overall project director for the Crossings 2003 project together with Kim Heh-Kyong, former curator at The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation in Seoul. James Jensen, Associate Director/Chief Curator for The Contemporary Museum, is organizing TCMâs exhibitions assisted by Allison Wong, TCM Assistant Curator/Curator for The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center.

Among the artists whose work will be on display at The Contemporary Museumâs Crossings 2003: Korea/HawaiÎi exhibition, September 19 through November 16, 2003, are the following:

Cho Duck-Hyun: The work of Cho Duck-Hyun addresses the profound social, political and economic changes that the Korean people experienced during the 20th Century. Through his work, he seeks to reconcile the complexities and dualities inherent in sweeping changes that resulted from seminal historical events: the colonization of Korea by Japan, WWII, the Korean War, postwar recovery, and the subsequent industrial and technical revolutions. Cho investigates the schisms that he perceives in contemporary Korea, a nation that increasingly sheds tradition as it embraces progress.

Chun Kwang-Young: Artist Chun Kwang-Youngâs work reflects his intense preoccupation with both minimalist art and the cultural history of his homeland. In the mid-1990s, Chun began a series of mixed media paintings and sculptural objects fashioned from paper. Formulated around the basic structural unit of the triangle, each work incorporates hundreds of such units wrapped in mulberry paper and arranged into larger compositions. The resulting pieces derive rich associations from the cultural uses of mulberry paper, which has served integral purposes in everyday Korean life.

Kim Young-Jin: By analyzing his own memories, Kim Young-Jin creates installations that explore the existence of self. The artist believes that each individual exists in a constructed reality that he or she perceives in an ever-so-slight time lag; therefore, each exists theoretically in the past. The artist thus probes the meaning of events that he has experienced. The resulting images, created by enlarged projections, express a balance within life and a harmony with nature.

Lee Hyung-Woo: Lee Hyung-Wooâs work exemplifies the basic tenets of minimalist sculpture: simple geometric forms and a configuration of interchangeable units in regular, grid-like installations. For Lee, the process of reduction involves stripping away all superfluous elements to both clarify and intensify a formâs meaning and unity.

Min Byung-Hun: Photographer Min Byung-Hun works from intuition, capturing the earth, sky, grass, stones, weeds and human body in works imbued with great lyricism and beauty. His images, which often appear ambiguous, imply the unknown and unseen, often recalling the Taoist and Buddhist traditions of landscape painting.

Whang Inkie: While trained as a painter, Whang Inkie terms his most recent work ãdigital landscape,ä in which traditional literati paintings are reinterpreted through modern means. The works are scanned and then reformulated into an accumulation of thousands of acrylic and silicon pieces. The resulting mosaic-like compositions resonate with viewers accustomed to a visual lexicon of digitized imagery, divergent social and historical sources, and cultural hybridity.

Hong Sung-Do: The multi-media work of Hong Sung-Do documents the artistâs exploration of light and deconstruction. The artistâs work has long utilized various reflective and illuminating media. Hong is also known for works in which he dissects and then reconstructs objects and photographic images, including a series on the body in which photographic images of body segments were reconstructed into larger figurative images using metal rivets. His most recent work, which will be on view in Crossings, involves direct scans of the body.

Park Hwa Young: Park Hwa Young, like many artists of her generation, moves fluently between various media, with content determining materials. Strongly individualistic, her work expresses a commitment to the dialogue inherent in visual art: a conversation between artist and audience, artist and inner world. In Daily Kleenex Documentation, rows of tissues are installed in the gallery space, each imprinted with the artistâs made-up face, a print taken at the end of each day during a period of time. This striking work functions as a documentation and material affirmation of life.

Jungjin Lee: Korean photographer Jungjin Leeâs compositions are not mechanically reproduced multiples, but instead bear the mark of the hand. The artistâs technique involves brushing liquid emulsion onto the surface of massive sheets of handmade rice paper. The texture of the paper and gestural marks of the brush create a unique, painterly effect. Four recent series of work, completed after the artistâs return to Korea from America, variously challenge and explore the traditional limitations and documentary function of photography.

Nam Zie: Nam Zieâs metal sculptures with movable parts, which are designed to fit on a human body, recall the surrealist trope of the unconscious as machine and represent a steadfast exploration of the self/body within paradigms that increasingly conceptualize the body out of material existence and into the realm of pure information. Within this context of physical crisis, Nam Zieâs mechanistic yet oddly moving work reaffirms the body and explores sentient human existence amidst notions of the artificial.

Kim You-Sun: Kim You-Sun chooses mother-of-pearl as a medium in part for its natural beauty and luminous quality, in part to express the processes of transformation and spiritual transcendence. Her work presents a reinterpretation of minimalist sculptural forms, with the mother-or-pearl applied as a surface veneer. The ãRainbow Project,ä of which one work will be on view, utilizes the symbolic motif of the rainbow as representing love and reconciliation.

Bae Joonsung: Bae Joonsung will exhibit work from two series that depict layered, figurative imagery. One series includes photographic images with a painting overlay on acetate. The other comprises portraits inspired by nineteenth-century European paintings, but reinterpreted using Korean models. This series involves a painting overlay on Plexiglas, which lifts to reveal a photographic image. In both series, the layering technique invites a voyeuristic involvement of the viewer, who is encouraged to lift the overlay to reveal a nude figure underneath the otherwise largely transparent surface.

In conjunction with The Contemporary Museumâs Crossings 2003 presentations, The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center in downtown Honolulu will host an exhibition titled, Contemporary Korean-American Artists of HawaiÎi, October 3, 2003 through January 6, 2004. This exhibition will feature artwork by Korean-American Artists living in HawaiÎi, with represented media including photography, sculpture, painting, fiber, printmaking and mixed media. Participating artists include Dana Forsberg, Ezekiel Chihye Hwang, Kloe Sookhee Kang, Diane Kim, Hyeyoung Kim, Jeeun Kim, Jinja Kim, Wendy Kim-Messier, Byoung Yong Lee, Chang Jin Lee, Geoff Lee and Jooyi Maya Lee.